Shankar Raman, Associate Professor of Literature at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, has produced an erudite, closely reasoned first
book that extends his research interests in colonialism and early modern
drama. Raman begins his book observing that Columbus thought that he had
sailed to India, and when this was discovered to be inaccurate, India
itself seems to have dropped out of the discourse of exploration. Framing
"India" then attempts to locate "India" in early
modern European culture and modern critical discourse. In order to produce
a study that addresses both these goals, Raman has employed a combination
of theoretical positions that is neither New Historicist or old historicist,
and instead draws on Hans Blumenberg's metaphorology as well as psychoanalytic
theories.

The study takes three parts. First, "The Limits of the World"
examines the use of metaphors of the cosmos and the voyage as a means
to investigate how Europe addressed the anxieties produced by the intersection
of the "discovery" of new knowledge and medieval cultural structures.
Raman begins this section with Luis Camões's epic poem of Vasco
da Gama's voyage to India, Os Lusíadas. Shankar sees the
Portuguese epic as a point where the metaphor of cosmos becomes destabilized.
In taking the nationalistic, idealized and ancient form of the epic and
combining it with a narrative of mercantile discovery, Camões embodies
early modern epistemological anxiety. India becomes, for the Portuguese,
the point at which the cosmos and the voyage intersect. It is a space
of nationalistic self-definition, but at the same time a space discovered
through a mercantile project engendered by an established aristocracy
and an emergent bourgeoisie.

The book turns briefly away from literature to examine early modern cartography
for the ways in which its portrayal of space, India specifically, defined
the East as well as Europe. The metaphor of cosmos is investigated in
terms of the development of astronomy and its critique of medieval notions
of celestial organization. Raman argues that as spatial knowledge of the
world began to change as a result of the voyages of discovery, a European
subject commensurate to this increased knowledge became necessary. The
geometrical grid map helped to do this by making India and the East visible
while at the same time reifying Europe's sense of its own superiority.

With the establishment of a knowable (though European) India, the second
section of the book, "Staging the East," investigates English
dramatic representations of India and the East. Raman sees the stage as
a place where India's becoming visible reflected English anxieties about
its national identity and colonial enterprise. John Fletcher's The
Island Princess (1621), for example, through its portrayal of Portuguese
colonialism both highlighted England's absence from the colonial enterprise
and appropriated Portugal's experience for English use. Raman goes further
to suggest that the literal space between the stage and the audience enabled
the audience to perceive the relationship between the colonizer and colonized,
and to see itself as "the subject of a colonial knowledge, potentially
a colonizing subject" (185).

Dryden's much later play, Amboyna (1673), appears when the East
India Company has established a permanent presence and a permanent trade
relationship in India. Depicting the 1623 Dutch massacre of twelve English
merchants, the play replaces the Portuguese competition with the Dutch
and suggests a much earlier beginning point for the English colonial enterprise.
The play's dominant metaphor is the market, where the English are characterized
as practicing a form of commerce derived from patronage, embodying honour,
gratitude and true faith. Dutch commercialism, on the other hand, is immoral,
lacking faith and reciprocity. For Raman, tension is created when, despite
these differences, both powers are portrayed pursuing colonial possession
by treating native Indians with a similar process of othering and erasure.

The final and briefest section of the book, "Upstaging the East"
continues the investigation of drama with A Midsummer Night's Dream
and shifts to a methodology based in Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The play, though it is chronologically out of place, presents further
elaborations on the figuring of identity, and metaphors of market and
commercial exchange. Unlike the earlier chapters, the use of Freud and
Lacan attempts to recognize the paradox implicit in any Western critique
of colonialism: that the critique itself is at least in part complicit
with the discourse of colonialism. The center of Raman's analysis is the
absent/present Indian Boy, fought over by Titania and Oberon. The boy
functions like the unconscious, always absent, yet always present. By
overcoming the matriarchal order, and appropriating the Indian Boy, the
play stages the emergence of the ideals of contractual exchange and the
market. This for Raman constitutes a reflection of the simultaneous emergence
and erasure of India in the English cultural imagination.

Raman concludes his study with a meditation on the place of literature
and literary study in a post-colonial world. Part of the importance of
the study of literature is that it helps us to understand how "the
lived Indias of the present continue to be shaped by the imagined as well
as real Indias of the past" (290).

I approached Framing India with anticipation, eager to read the
latest addition to a small, but growing body of work addressing the early
modern European experience with India and the East, as well as the necessary
and concomitant interrogation of the period in terms of colonialism. This
investigation of early modern colonialism, English colonialism in particular,
is one of the book's most valuable contributions. A tendency to read post-Reformation
English colonialism chronologically backward as if it were an always-already
cultural condition still seems to exist . Raman joins scholars such as
Nabil Mater, Gerald MacLean, Joan-Pau Rubiés, Jyotsna G. Singh
and Daniel Vitkus in the investigation of the early modern European encounter(s)
with the East and how the encounters shaped and were shaped by the writing
of the time.

Framing "India" is a densely written, carefully argued
work that not only provides thoughtful readings of a range of early modern
European texts, but through a use of a variety of methodologies, maintains
an awareness of its own critical position in a post-colonial world.

Works Cited

MacLean, Gerald. "Ottomanism before Orientalism? Bishop King Praises
Henry Blount, Passenger in the Levant." In Travel Knowledge: European
"Discoveries" in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Ivo Kamps and
Jyotsna G. Singh. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 85-96.

Matar, Nabil. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery.
New York: Columbia UP, 1999.

Rubiés, Joan-Pau. Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South
India through European Eyes, 1250-1625. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.